CHAPTER XV

_My Dinner to Miss Pearl Veal_

I gave a delightful little dinner in my rooms the other evening in honor of my fiancée, Miss Pearl Veal. Of course there were some hitches, but they were such as are likely to occur in any similar affair in a bachelor room-hold, so altogether it was a success. The company was limited by the size of my study, but I managed to get together a thoroughly interesting and congenial crowd of people. Radigan could not come, as there was an important meeting of the vestry of St. Edward's to devise ways and means of redecorating the rectory, but J. Madison Mudison took his place at the last minute, after telephoning to Miss Bumpschus that he had been called suddenly out of town and could not go to the opera with them. Mrs. Radigan chaperoned, and, besides Miss Veal, the Countess Poglioso Spinnigini and Mrs. Bobbie Q. Williegilt were there, and with Bobbie Q., Arthur Slaughterblock-Jones, and myself we just had elbow-room at the table.

Slaughterblock-Jones was the only new-comer and doubtful quantity. He is from Chicago, but having made a fortune in the formation and collapse of the United States Stove-lifter Company, he has hyphenated his name, moved to New York, and is living at the Ping-pong Club. I must say his acquaintance has hitherto been limited to rather queer people, but as he has given me some useful tips in the market, I thought I would show my appreciation by letting him have an opportunity to meet a few of the smart set. He really did fairly well, and his stories, fresh from the woolly West, were an agreeable change from the worn jokes of Mr. Mudison. Mrs. Radigan has taken him up, and has sent him an invitation to the Indian ball, with which the new house is to be opened. But, of course, he had to make some bad breaks. When he had sent us all off into convulsions over his anecdote about the Irishman and the life-insurance agent, he had to be reminded of another which he had heard at the Van Rundouns. Of all the people in the world to mention! Turning to Mrs. Williegilt he asked her if, by the way, she knew the Van Rundouns, and she replied that she believed they at one time had a place next hers in Westchester, but she did not know them. She said it very quietly, but so firmly that he should have understood. He did not. He had to go blundering on, talking familiarly--I might almost say boastingly--of those queer friends of his. He did not seem to realize that these were the swells of yesterday; that they no longer stirred the social sea. For a moment I was in a panic lest he ask Mrs. Radigan if she knew the Van Rundouns, and I had to break in and ask Mr. Mudison to propound the riddle he had given me the day before when we happened to meet on the avenue.

But I am getting into the middle of the dinner before even the soup. To begin with, my rooms looked charmingly cosey. I had taken down the overflow of real-estate maps from my office and the pictures I got in Paris and put in their places some sporting prints and a dozen or so photographs of Pearl Veal. Stalk looked after everything. He is my new man, for it seemed to me that I was justified in having him when I was soon to marry four millions, and he looked so extremely well that Mrs. Radigan, thinking he was a man she had met somewhere, bowed most familiarly to him when she came in. The Countess thought he was Mr. Williegilt, and to avoid further trouble I had to whisper to him to stand in the hall till everybody arrived.

The worst hitch of the evening was the ruin of the bottle of cocktails I had had mixed by William at the Ticktock Club. He makes the only cocktail in New York that is fit to drink. And after I had explained to everybody how good it was, Stalk went to the patent ammonia refrigerator in the bathroom, to find that the temperature there had suddenly dropped about 100 below zero, and the precious beverage was frozen solid. As it would have taken an hour to thaw that amber ice, we had to send downstairs for aid. Such cocktails as they sent up! There was entirely too much bitters in them, and Mrs. Williegilt got a bad olive in hers. As it went down she looked as if she were my enemy for life. I don't know what the other stuff in them was, but the effect was immediate. All the steam in the building seemed to be pouring into the radiator and to defy all efforts to keep it out. We had to open the windows wide to reduce our temperature, and the contest between Mrs. Williegilt and the olive waxed fierce for a time, but we hurried the champagne and she won.

Gray care was soon cast aside. The dinner was excellent in spite of the distance to the apartment-house kitchen. Madison Mudison was inclined to think that the champagne, though fair, was a trifle too sweet, but he always makes it a point to find some slight fault with the wine, and I did not mind it. Pearl smiled delightfully from soup to coffee. Mudison and Slaughterblock-Jones vied with each other in telling stories. Even Mrs. Radigan asked what was the difference between a cab horse and a bunch of roses, but when we all gave it up she had forgotten. Bobbie Williegilt made two rolls into dough balls, and I interpreted to the Countess all that was said, resorting to French, German, and gestures as a mode of communication.

It was about coffee that a lull in the conversation gave me an opportunity to say that I had gathered my few nearest friends together in my bachelor quarters; it would be my last dinner of the kind in my rooms, as I was about to give up the delightful freedom of bachelorhood for the still more delightful captivity of a home with a wife for a jailer. Miss Veal and I--I got no further than that, there was such an outburst of congratulations. Everybody pretended to be so surprised, though, of course, they had read all about it in _Town Twaddle_.

The Countess made a little trouble in the lull that followed the applause, for, not being able to understand me very well, she conceived the idea that the demonstration had something to do with Pearl's former engagement to Plumstone Smith, and, smiling at my fiancée, she raised her glass and proposed, "Monsieur Smees." They had a terrible time explaining it all to her, and Pearl and I had to look as if we were not in the room, though we could have heard Mrs. Radigan a block away as she made her French plain by shouting.

Madison Mudison was charming. He saved the day. He choked the Countess off, and, pushing his chair back from the table and eying his glass meditatively, he made a delightful little informal speech, forgetting entirely that but a few weeks before at the Radigan dinner he had welcomed Pearl Veal into the family of Smith. As Mrs. Radigan's sister, he said, he regarded Miss Veal as near and dear to him. Were he a younger man, a richer man, a handsomer and a wiser man, he might perhaps be here in a different rôle--with apologies to his host--he might aspire to a relationship still nearer and dearer. Too late in life he had come to realize that love in a cottage was better than bachelorhood in a dozen clubs. His part was to bless the mating of others. He wanted now, speaking for his dear friends, to welcome into the house of Radigan his young host. Money was not all of life; family was not all; brains were not all. He gloried in his young host, who, having none of these things, had come to New York, had made an honored name for himself in the real-estate world, had won the beautiful daughter of one of the city's best families. Miss Veal was lucky to win such a man. His young host was lucky to win such a girl. The Radigans were lucky. We all were lucky.

I was just remarking that I believed I was the luckiest man in all the world when the telephone-bell interrupted, and Mrs. Bobbie Williegilt, being nearest it, playfully took up the receiver. She dropped it in a jiffy and sternly called to me.

"I was sayin'," came a voice from the office, "that our rules requires that all ladies leaves the buildin' at eleven o'clock."

"But--" I began to protest.

"We can't make no exceptions," said the idiot in the office.

"See here," I began, getting desperate, for I heard Mrs. Williegilt calling for her wraps.

"We can't run no risks," said the big, loud voice below. "It's past the hour now."

Stalk went down with a five-dollar bill and got an hour's grace, but fifteen minutes was all that was really needed, for by that time Mrs. Williegilt had led my guests on the retreat.